Rock The Bells 2008

"It ain't the sixties again

Niggas ain't hippies again

We ain't falling for the same traps"

Nas, "Black President"

It's in my nature to over-interpret things. I can not help but attempt to dissect things, to take any event or action or text and to read into it for the subtle themes and the buried messages. To disinter any subtext that might be there. And since we're living in an age of 24 news cycles that thrive on over-analysis and perpetual commentary on minutia, an era where a jubilant husband's celebratory fist bump with his wife on one of the single biggest nights of his life becomes grist for days of interpretation and commentary, my natural tendency becomes perhaps even more pronounced. So, when presented with a major hip hop festival, held outside of Washington DC, in a year when a black man is the Democratic nominee for the Presidency of the United States, it would be all to easy to see the event as being simply one enormous symbol. But this would miss the point entirely. The Rock The Bells Festival was both less than that and so much more.

"Run-D.M.C. first said a DJ could be a band

Stand on your feet, get you out of your seat

Beat is for Eric B. and LL as well, hell

Was is for Anthrax, still it can rock bells"

-Public Enemy, "Bring the Noise"

Murs:

Murs opened the show on the main stage, going on about 90 minutes after the doors officially opened, and before a significant portion of the crowd had arrived. Murs was as charismatic as usual, joking that he had learned from this stop on the tour that not all of Maryland is like The Wire, and promising that if there was rain, he was going to slide down the hill where the lawn seating was. His set included "Early Mornin' Tony", from the second Felt album, "Bad Man" and "H.U.S.T.L.E" from the Murs 3:16: The Ninth Edition album and "Looking Fly", form his upcoming Murs For President album. He also plugged his latest collaboration with Durham's Ninth Wonder (Murs' mention of Ninth got a bigger pop than when he mentioned his collaboration with Slug from Atmosphere, which might give you some idea of the what the crowd was into. Unless I am, despite my intentions, already reading too much into things).

The next act was a local MC named Wale, who I only knew from a guest spot on the latest Roots album. But at least some of the crowd seemed to know him. Wale did two songs, then left after promising he would return. After Wale, Supernatural, who was emceeing (the master of ceremony kind, although he also is the hip-hop kind of MC, if you follow) free styled for a bit. He broke out the classic freestyle spot of asking people in the front row to hand him objects to rhyme about. This was fine.

Dead Prez

The first overtly political act of the show, Dead Prez opened with "Turn Off The Radio", then tried to make me lose interest when they claimed that "George Bush is way worse than Bin Laden is". I've gotten somewhat used to rappers (and non-rapping liberals who've had eight years of the Bush debacle to ratchet their hyperbole up) saying stupid shit like this, but it still irritates me. If you want to argue that Bush is the worst president ever (which I still don't actually agree with), fine. But comparing Bush to Bin Laden (or Hitler, or whichever other monster you can think of) reduces your political message to an Internet flame war. In the middle of their set, DP performed "Hip Hop", which is unquestionably their biggest hit (in part thanks to Dave Chappelle, but it was huge before Dave began using it as his intro music every week on his TV show) which struck me as an odd choice. They played a bit from Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" to transition into "Mind Sex", and that was fine.

Immortal Technique

This act I was dreading. Immortal Technique is probably one of the ten most gifted MCs in independent hip-hop, but his politics irk me even more than those of Dead Prez. He started off his set by yelling "Bin Laden didn't blow up the projects", which is true, but irrelevant. He then said something to the effect that Bin Laden didn't attack the third world. This is bullshit. When Al Qaeda bombed the US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, at least 200 Kenyans and 11 Tanzanians were killed, compared to approximately 12 Americans. Keith and I decided that this set would be a good time to get some lunch. As we were walking away, Immortal began talking about how Bush brought down the World Trade Center. In short, Immortal is a wonderfully talented MC, but as far as I'm concerned he can go fuck himself.

Rakim

Rakim, almost universally hailed as one of, if not the absolute, greatest rappers of all time was next. His set mostly consisted of standards like "My Melody", "Don't Sweat the Technique", "I Ain't No Joke", and a version of "Paid In Full" that was mostly performed by the crowd. I've seen Rakim headline the Cat's Cradle, and naturally it was better seeing him at a smaller venue, but I also feel like the mix was slightly off, making the 3o set slightly disappointing. But, hey, it's still Rakim.

Wale came out again, and did his bit from his Roots collaboration, "Rising Up".

Ghostface and Raekwon.

They did a mix of their solo stuff and some Wu-Tang standards like "Ice Cream", "Bring Da Ruckus" and "C.R.E.A.M.". Then came the mandatory ODB tribute, which led into a version of "Shimmy Shimmy Ya". Every Wu-Tang member I've seen live has basically done this, so it wasn't unexpected.

We left before the end of this set to catch the Cool Kids at the second stage. The Cool Kids are an indy group, who've described themselves as "The Black Beastie Boys", which is oddly fitting for their style. It began raining a little during their set, but it still kicked ass. I would have liked to see the whole performance, but I had to leave early to catch De La Soul. Keith, who has seen De La before stayed for the whole set, and seemed to enjoy it.

De La Soul

I was expecting De La to include the Gorillaz track "Feel Good Inc." in their set. I mean, every time I've see Del he's closed with "Clint Eastwood". But this wasn't to be. Good set from De La, including "Potholes In My Lawn", "Stakes Is High", a small medley from the De La Soul is Dead album and "Me, Myself and I". For "Buddy", Q-Tip joined the group on stage.

As soon as the De La set is over, we went back to the second stage to see part of hip hop legend Afrika Bambaataa's DJ set. Unfortunately, Bambaataa wasn't wearing his outfit from the "Renegades of Funk video.

His set was basically dance music (James Brown, Prince, Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock), so after about ten minutes in the drizzling rain, we went back to catch Method Man and Redman's set.

Meth and Red:

If you like songs about getting high, this was the set for you. They wound up running long, and I really believe that after the fifth song about blunts and 40's, I understood just how much they enjoy intoxicants. Or maybe it was just the humidity making me cranky. Also, I couldn't stop thinking about the last time I know of Meth being in Maryland, when he was being interrogated by Bunk Moreland about having killed his dog. (You see, the cops had heard on the wiretap that Cheese (Method Man) had said that he killed his dog. But they thought that he was using the term "dog" in the colloquial sense, rather than having literally killed his pit bull after losing a dogfight. It was way more awesome than it sounds). They played "How High", from the feature film of the same name, and promised that a sequel is coming. Oh joy. There was another ODB tribute, only this time they did "Shame on a Nigga" and "Got Your Money". At this point, it occurred to me how glad I am that pro wrestlers don't feel the need to shout out all the dead wrestlers at every show. Wrestlemania would last 9 or 10 hours. At the end of their set, Meth and Red invaded the crowd while kind of performing "Rapper's Delight". That was pretty damn cool.

Next up was the reunited Pharcyde. Unlike all of the acts up to this point, who had simply used the video screens to show live footage of the show, Pharcyde had a whole video package prepared for their set. From our seats, I could see the stage pretty well, but for the people on the lawn this might have sucked a little. They opened with "4 Better of 4 Worse", then went into "Running", which featured a graphic honoring the late producer J. Dilla. Keith joked that when Obama makes his Inaguration speech, he'll feel the need to shout-out ODB and Dilla. Fatlip performed his solo track "What Up Fatlip". The set went on with "Yo Mama", "Pack the Pipe" and closed with "Passin' Me By", which has to be on the shortlist of the greatest hip hop songs ever. I liked this set a lot.

Mos Def.

Now this was just... perplexing. I like Mos Def a lot as a rapper, but I have a theory that Mos works much better with a collaborator to reign in all of the things he's interested in doing at any given moment, because left to his own devices, we get sets like this. He opened with a kind of cover of "The Message", then there was a bunch of that Jamaican style of rapping that guys like KRS do, and some Reggae style singing. I'm not recognizing most of what he's doing until he does "New World Water", off of his first (and only really really good) solo album. More Jamaican stuff. Dude is from Brooklyn, not Kingston. He finally gets around to "Definition", but apparently couldn't find someone to do Kweli's part (or just do Talib's part himself. I've seen guys from the Wu-Tang do two or three different rappers' parts of songs), so the song just kind of ended. The crowd was really into "Definition", because the song is so fucking awesome. The only other song in his set that I recognized was "Ms. Fat Booty". I really wanted to like Mos' set, but instead I was just kind of confused and disappointed.

But things were about to change.

NAS.

Nas opened with "Hip Hop is Dead". If I was one of the simple-minded people who had simply pre-judged the song and album when Nas announced it, I would probably write something about how ironic the opener was. But I'm not. He played a couple of tracks from his new album, Untitled, namely "N.I.G.G.E.R. (The Slave and the Master)" and "Sly Fox", his attack on Fox News and Bill O'Reilly, in particular their criticism of him for doing a benefit concert after the Virginia Tech massacre. Nas was already on fire. His new album is amazing- easily my front-runner for the best album of 2008, and his delivery was impeccable. After three songs, he already owned this crowd. If I could tell you how much this ruled, I would be Greil Marcus. Next came a sort of medley off of his landmark debut Illmatic, including "New York State of Mind" (which he changed to "D.C. State of Mind") "It Ain't Hard To Tell", "One Love", "The World Is Yours" and "Life's A Bitch". During this part of his show, someone threw a beach ball onto the stage. Now, I've always of Nas as being far too serious for his own good- a trait that I think has held him back from being as loved as he is respected. So, I expected Nas to either ignore the beach ball, or get snarly about it. Instead, he just playfully threw it back into the crowd. Next was "Street Dreams" (his re-working of "Sweet Dreams are Made of These" and "If I Ruled the World".

Now, Nas' new album ends with one of the best political hip-hop tracks from a main-stream artist in some time. "Black President", which opens with a sample from Tupac's "Changes-"Although it seems heaven sent/we ain't ready to have a black president" immediately countered with a "Yes we can/change the world", with a sample of Obama saying "Change the World". It works amazingly well. And live, with a crowd of thousands of Obama supporters, this brought chills to my fucking spine. This was the moment where all of the potential symbolism I was talking about earlier actually came together to create real magic.

After the high spot of "Black President', Nas began winding down his set with high spots like an exuberantly defiant "Hate Me Now", "Got Urself A..." which his DJ mixed with the beat from "Still D.R.E.", "Made You Look" and finally "One Mic", which he put everything into. His set seemed to prove what Rock The Bells is meant to be- that all we really need is one mic and one beat. This set should have closed the show, because there was no way that anyone could top that. This was everything that I love about hip-hop, everything that I love about music- the passion and the intellect, the heart and the brain. I probably sound like a fucking idiot at this point, but... Fuck, it was just better than anything.

A Tribe Called Quest closed the show. Their set was fine, but I was spent from the Nas set, and probably didn't enjoy it as much as I would have if the sets had been reversed. Tribe hit most of their high spots- "Excursions", "Oh My God", "Lyrics To Go", "Footprints", "Bonita Applebaum", "Check The Rhime" and "Scenario". And, as everyone probably expected, they closed with "Can I Kick It?". Not only is that the right song in terms of crowd recognition, it was fitting to close the giant hip hop show with a song so quintessentially hip-hop, if you see what I mean. Or maybe I've been typing this up for so long my mind is beginning to go, but I decided that I would have to get through this in one shot or it probably wouldn't be finished until next week. Anyway, I was surprised that the line about David Dinkins, which is a nearly two-decade old reference to NYC mayoral politics, was left in. I would have bet money that they would have come up with an Obama reference to replace it. This is why I don't gamble, I guess.

So, yeah. Awesome show, and Nas ruling more than made up for any slight disappointments about Immortal being a jackass and Mos being confusing.

"There's no delayin'

what I'm sayin'

as I'm rockin' you well

Rock the Bells"

-LL Cool J, "Rock The Bells"

Live at the Crossroads: Little Brother at the Cat's Cradle.

Better late than never, I suppose.

Little Brother got a deal with Atlantic as much because Ninth Wonder worked with Jay-Z as the considerable strength of their album The Listening. They put out an instant classic concept album, The Minstrel Show, and seemed to be on the verge of something huge. But a funny thing happened on the way to stardom- the album sold considerably below everyone's expectations, and BET refused to air one video on the grounds that it was "too smart" (this is, of course, precisely what the Minstrel Show album was satirizing). After that, producer Ninth Wonder- in many ways the biggest star in the group- left (or was asked to leave) and Atlantic lost interest in promoting the group. So, here we have a group that many feel to be the legitimate heirs of golden-age icons like De La Soul or A Tribe Called Quest, but instead of of arriving at the next level, they have arrived at the crossroads. As I was thinking about their upcoming free concert at the Cat's Cradle, I could not help but wonder if the group was in the process of regrouping, playing in their own backyard, or if they were about to fall apart.

It is, I think, only a slight exaggeration to view the current state of main-stream hip hop as being in a place much like the precarious position I imagined LB to be in, and that the case of LB demonstrates exactly how popular hip hop wound up in the place it is. Make no mistake, above ground hip hop is in a bad shape- athough for most of my time as a music fan I've been a casual observer of the hip hop scene, I can never remember things being quite like this- not even in the worst days of the East Coast/West Coast feud. Record sales across the music industry, of course, are down, but it has been demonstrated that hip hop sales are especially down, and more than that, quality artists have all but disappeared from the soundscan charts- with OutKast apparently all but broken up as a musical duet, Jay-Z's mediocre last album, Eminem's last solo album three years in the rearview mirror and even the Beastie Boys putting out a solo album of insturmentals, Kanye West seems to be the last bastion of the main stream still putting out music that demands listenings. The industry is drowning in inane, monotous krunk-drenched nonsense, and while the underground is thriving, unless Common or Kanye West can capture the airwaves it is hard to imagine any of them crossing over to the mainstream.

Little Brother, who aren't off when they complain of "more press than soundscans" seems to be in a particularily tricky situation. While BET calls them "too smart" for the mainstream, LB would appear to be too rooted in a classic hip-hop tradition to follow the paths of acts like Aesop Rock, El-P, Atmosphere or Sage Francis, who have been able to reach large crowds of backpackers and skaters, more conversant with the Pixies or White Stripes than De La Soul or Rakim. Instead of being seen as the best of both worlds- as clever as the underground but able to make people move like the above ground, LB, one fears, could wind up stuck fifteen years too late- a throwback to Native Tongues in a time when De La only makes the airwaves working with Gorillaz. And worst of all, this comes at a time when the mainstream NEEDS an act like LB more than ever- someone smart and able to point out the absurdities of the current scene over beats too good to be ignored. LB put it wonderfully- " I love hip hop, I just hate the niggas in it". This is precisely the voice that hip hop needs to avoid becoming even more of a bloated parody of itself in the public's eye.

As it turns out, if LB is in trouble, then no one told Phonte and Big Pooh. They took the stage before an audience that could only have been more of a home crowd if the show had been in the middle of the NC Central campus, and the two MCs were relaxed and fully confident in their considerable powers. I think we sometimes forget that hip hop, despite it's serious, politically concious side- it's role as the "CNN of the streets" (although lately one would be forgiven for mistaking it for the Home Shopping Network) is supposed to be fun. LB Is fully capable of cutting as deep as anyone, but their best work has often been as funny as it is socially concious or politically relevant. This, I think, more than any other factor, is why I'm not alone in persistently trying to compare them to the best of the Native Tongues stable.

Playing with a live backing band, Orgone, instead of with a DJ (prompting Phonte, if I remember correctly- a dubious proposition, since it's not in my notes, to joke that we were witnessing LB unplugged) LB put on a show that easily convinced me that my fears for the group's future were sorely misplaced. In between songs from both albums and their Chitlin Circuit mixtapes, the band joked around, clearly having a great time- they took us to church- a church not far from James Brown's Triple Rock Baptist Church in the Blues Brothers, giving the audience a rendition of "The Greatest Love of All" straight out of the funniest scene in Coming to America ("That boy's good!"). Unsurprisingly, their was a Justus League cameo, Khryis (I hope I spelled that in the correct incorrect way). Despite my own hopes, Big Daddy Kane, who collaborated with LB on the fantastic soundtrack song "Welcome to Durham" (Best line- "Goddamn- I found Brooklyn in the South) and who was a surprise guest at the GZA's similar free show, did not make an appearance, but I suppose I can hardly blame LB for my own fantasies not coming through. It didn't matter that much anyway, it's not like anyone was dissapointed when the show ended.

If LB is at a critical juncture in their career, which I still think is slightly true, that night they demonstrated that Big Pooh and Phonte were more than capable of overcoming this situation. A new album, Get Back, is set to drop this fall (I'm probably the only person who connected the album title with the Beatle's legendarily acrimonious "Get Back" sessions, which produced the Let It Be album, and I'm almost certainly wrong in reading this into the new project). Little Brother is probably not going to get the opportunity to save the industry, but they never asked for that thankless role anyway. And at any rate, as long as acts like LB are around, on the verge of the mainstream but apparently too good to break through, the music will be fine. And ultimately, as long as the music survives (as it will always do) then the industry can be damned.